


Peace Came Slow, At Last It Found You

by LittleRedCosette



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Killing Death Has Consequences, Or At Least It Should, Possible Character Death, Post-Season/Series 11, Tagging Would Be Spoiling, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-10-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 07:58:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11985570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: AD is a dangerous time for the world to fall apart.(Anno Domini, After Death, After Dean. Pick any which one you like, Sam thinks, the world is still falling apart.)After the sun doesn't implode and Dean Winchester doesn't die and Amara doesn't destroy everything in her path, something far more sinister than a soul-hungry God-Twin starts the creep its way across the world.The absence of Death has left an imbalance, one that can't be contained. As Sam and Castiel scramble to fit the pieces together, Dean and the newly resurrected Mary Winchester have a long journey ahead of them.





	1. I Wanted A Quiet Room

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this story, as well as all chapter titles and all quotes, belongs to the effervescent folk band, Birds of Chicago.
> 
> There are lots of opinions expressed about a lot of things and they in no way necessarily reflect my thoughts and opinions. There are also a lot of canon-typical coping mechanisms that I do not advise you try at home.
> 
> Also, I really don’t think it was acknowledged enough in Season 12, but Mary will have been younger than Dean when brought back to life. I just couldn’t accept it in my head, it all hurt too much. Honestly, I think she is probably be younger than Sam, too.
> 
> Please read, review, let me know your thoughts.

 

.

.

_(Who put those mountains there? Who dipped that sun in rose? Who took my heart and went the way the swallows go?)_

_._

_._

As it turns out, apologies from God are just as hollow as those from Man.

“I am so sorry, Dean,” He says, morose, mortified.

Chuck, those seal eyes, jittery mouth wrangled tight into knots.

And Amara, Her fierce expressions, blazing with embarrassment, with self-deprecating horror that doesn’t suit Her.

And Dean, he‘s terrified. His resolve is firm, and he can just about convince himself he can still feel the heat from those parting hugs. But he’s Hell deep, brain freeze shitting bricks all the same.

“I am so sorry,” Chuck says.

So does Amara, though not out loud.

She’s barely a foot away now, palms outstretched,

“If I detonate the bomb I can contain it,” she says, cool and shaking. “It will take a few seconds to fade; there will be some residual light and energy. It might feel like hours, because there are so many, but in reality it will only last a few seconds.”

“You’ve done this before?” Dean taunts, but the words taste of bile, and he licks his lips.

 _Sammy_ , he thinks again, one last time. _My brother Sam_.

Chuck cocks His head, like He heard it.

“Just do it,” Dean says through gritted teeth.

“There’s no way to extract your soul from the others,” Amara explains, and Jesus- _fuck_ if that doesn’t sound like the worst apology in the history of absolution.

“Yeah, I know, I get it. Yippee ki yay motherfucker. Let’s do this,” he snaps.

Clenches his fists like he’s pumping for a match.

 _There’s a space in heaven that won’t ever be filled_. The thought comes, so clearly he almost believes they’re his own words.

But Chuck’s expression darkens further, pleading His _sorrys_ , and Dean shakes God’s remorse out of his head, His regret out of his heart.

“Do it, Amara, before they all burn me up,” Dean growls, shifts his weight and closes his eyes and effortless as grief on a rainy day he conjures a memory of Sam, three years old with pen on his cheek, purple, and his face fat with clinging infancy, squealing delighted jabbers as he shows Dean the picture he drew of the cat in the tree that looks more like a banana in a firework display.

Amara’s hands touch his chest and it isn’t so much pain as it is annihilation.

Dean, obliterating slowly into atoms, and maybe he screams or maybe he’s already gone. But it’s a visceral, pounding accident inside the ventricles of his heart, when his resolve shifts into violent anger and an absolute feeling of just how unfuckingfair this is, when his soul trapped among the millions screams it’s piercing death cry.

In his heart he feels the hateful love of his brother’s aliveness.

 _Sammy_ , his heart soars like a storm.

 _Castiel_ , his soul cries one last time.

And then he’s gone.

.

.

Before this, though, the unfolding future had already begun.

.

.

Alice Havisham had not intended to live up to her name, but nominative determinism had won out, despite her very best efforts.

When Joe had left, New Year’s Eve morning, seven years ago, he’d taken her resolve with him.

(Probably would have taken the engagement ring, too, if it hadn’t been snug on her finger as she bellowed and howled at his betrayal.)

She resigned to spinsterhood, to being Aunty Alice. To answering telephone calls at her desk and doodling cartoon penguins on her notepads.

She tied her hair up in neat, nape of the neck ponytails, wore flattering pencil skirts and brown mascara and thin, silver necklaces. She drank vodka soda limes on Fridays with the girls and sometimes hooked up with lonely heart, divorced men who would fill her up body and soul for a few hours of wet, heavy bliss.

(Or sometimes only a few minutes, but at least then she had a funny, dirty story to tell the next time Friday rolled around.)

There was happiness to be found even in loneliness, and Alice took it upon herself to – well, not _look_ for it, perhaps, but certainly never to deny herself it.

She could not have suspected, not anticipated…

Ten years previous, when the first month came and went with an unopened box of tampons, she had only sighed a shy, sorry sigh.

And then the next, a pain in her heart for a life reaching out towards its final chapter in fast bursts of midnight sweating and lamenting of wasted time.

Then it happened again.

Ten years after all hope faded in a three week sign off work for medical stress, she woke up in the night vomiting and didn’t sleep for three days.

“It’s not over. My body is yet to finish punishing me,” Alice snarled impotently into her orange juice while her big sister frowned over the coffee table.

“Are you sure?” Lucy asked in that wise _big sister_ voice she had adopted at the age of ten.

“What else could it be?” Alice snapped, choking on her strangled, abject grief.

“Well,” Lucy muttered, brave and wise Lucy, eyebrows high on her softly lined forehead.

“No,” Alice growled.

There’s anger in loneliness, too.

“That’s impossible,” she whispered into her orange juice. “I’m fifty-six, Lucy. I haven’t had a fucking period in a decade.”

But the human soul, it’s such a resilient, remarkable thing.

The hope that springs eternal burned inside her gut.

Inside her womb.

Thomas William Havisham was born in October, loved by his mother so fiercely he had blossomed under her adorations.

“My little miracle,” she would kiss into his head as he slept. “My little angel.”

.

.

When Dean is gone, he wakes up to screaming. A woman’s screaming, shrill and deep and full of blood.

When Dean is gone, he opens his eyes.

The woman is familiar.

Mother-sister-daughter familiar.

 _Sam_ familiar.

Dean opens his eyes and sees her, naked and chained with iron manacles at her ankles, gripping the wall she’s backed up against. Skin dark and shiny with sweat, hair a shock of gold and red and black, blazing damp. Naked, legs pulled apart and she’s wet there, too.

But it’s crimson, tearing in tandem with her screams, face waxy, bruised with exhaustion.

Eyes full of ancient youth and wonder. Belly swollen, skin taut and wet. She writhes like the world is falling apart beneath her.

 _Dean_ ! she bellows, and he doesn’t _think_ he’s ever had sex with her but _screw this_ if he’s having another supernatural kid to break his heart over.

When Dean is gone, he dies the death of every soul scorching his insides.

And that woman, as familiar as Sam, as Bobby, as Cas. Screaming his name, screaming words he doesn’t understand.

She’s screaming _I can’t stop it, Dean. It’s coming, Dean. Dean Dean Dean._

.

.

_(They told me you were dead before you died. Oh that your mind was gone, you were broken.)_

.

.

The drive home is long.

Sam does it in one go. Can’t bear not to, can’t bring himself to stop except for one refuel when the engine starts to squeal its hungry protest.

Castiel sits shotgun. Sits in Sam’s seat and looks very small.

Then again, Sam feels awful small himself behind the wheel, too. Same way he did when he was fifteen, turning circles in an empty field under the stern, cautious tutelage of his big brother.

The Bunker draws closer, empty home.

(Why couldn’t they get a dog that could greet them with that boundless love they have?)

Sam risks a glance at Castiel.

(Maybe they will, now.)

The light is dimming around them, sunset racing their journey, which could have been less than a blink if Cas had done as he tried to insist, but the angel at least understood that Sam needed this. Needed to run himself as ragged as the Impala’s dusty wheels. Needed the punishing headache of driving all day without shades to protect against the newly restored sun.

The Bunker draws closer and Cas looks forlorn, ravaged, calm.

Looks like he wants to keel over again and yell some more, and if that wasn’t one of the scariest damn things Sam’s ever seen, then Sam Winchester doesn’t know fear at all.

(He does, he knows it well, knows it intimately. It runs riot in his heart.)

Cas hasn’t made a sound since he roared Sam’s brother’s same like rage into the good night. Since Sam picked him up off the ground like he was a wounded dog, tender and apologetic and hurting, too.

Sam drives into the Bunker garage and the smallness inside him shrinks and expands, stinging every part of him. Castiel shifts in the soft leather. His gaze is on Sam’s hands, gripping the wheel tight, real tight. His eyes pink and sore, a split in his lower lip he hasn’t thought to heal yet.

Castiel, Angel of the Lord, this quiet mouse sitting next to Sam.

The garage lights flicker on at their entry, ugly fluorescent yellow after the pink and gold of the sun.

It had seemed like such a terrifying place to return to, when they started.

The anticlimax is a pit between them and the irony of the disappointment is not lost on Sam, who heaves a deep breath to fortify his grief with a wall of iron before –

“I thought it would be painless.”

Castiel, who sounds _surprised_.

Sam looks at his passenger, but Cas doesn’t look back. Just stares at the radio like he’s waiting for it to start blaring Metallica.

Sam looks at his passenger and he sees it, then. The cowardice of humanity that has poisoned this angel. He thinks, maybe Metatron was right, maybe Hannah was right, maybe they were all right, fucking _Uriel_ , even, that the Winchesters have destroyed beyond repair something inside a creature of brightness, a being of cosmic energy, not _this_.

“For him or for you?” Sam asks, and it’s supposed to be kind because he’s the kind one, he’s the understanding one (isn’t he?) but he can’t, he just can’t anymore. And the question is cold and deadly and full to the brim with accusations.

Castiel’s eyes burn white wet. The audacious betrayed.

Sam is furious.

This rat, Castiel.

Castiel, who dared to acknowledge the one thing Sam never wanted to know. Can’t live the rest of his life knowing.

(Because he thought it would be painless, too, he really, really did.)

“I felt it,” Castiel continues, looks _ashamed_ of himself, but screw him is he thinks he’s allowed to feel bad while he unburdens himself onto Sam over the death of Sam’s one great constant. “I heard his soul –”

“I don’t care,” Sam interrupts. Throat parched, gut empty from throwing up half his intestines in the toilet before paying at the gas station. “It won’t change anything.”

Sam can feel Dean inside his head. Dean yelling inside his skull to shut up, to shout, to blame, to give in, to keep fighting. Dean’s hurt and Dean’s despair.

Grief, it’s called, and really, it’s the only Winchester heirloom left to inherit.

But the opportunity to spurn that heirloom, to cast off those cobwebs, well, it’s too much for Sam.

His smile a physical pain against his sadness, the insides of his cheeks bitten raw. Sam laughs at the sight of Castiel’s own tear stricken, tired face. Laughs until his belly aches and his own tears are burning rivers to his jaw, clenched tight but those traitorous words they escape him anyway.

“He loved you,” Sam says, fresh air inside the pyramid, like he’s discovered some unfathomable creature, dug up a fact from the mud of history, ready to thrust it in Castiel’s face.

Truth.

Truth, so very malleable compared to fact.

And Castiel’s sad eyes, his downturned lips. Sitting in an Impala he didn’t grow up in, but is comforted by the bleed of leather and sun sweat all the same.

“He loved you, too,” he says, like it’s the same thing.

(It isn’t.)

Truth in his mouth and his mind, in his heart.

He ducks out of the car like he’s human. Slams the door behind him like he’s human, too, full of human rage, the impotent kind.

Dean’s rage.

Sam’s rage.

And Sam, sitting in the driver’s seat feeling more out of place than he did at fifteen.

Throat aching before he hears his own screaming. Knuckles stinging before he feels the steering wheel beneath his hands.

Screams himself hoarse, beats his fists bruised.

And then the stillness.

Loud breaths in the aftermath and the car, she listens.

Listens and listens.

Listens to Sam, sweating and crying and hating all over, a marathon that started with Hell Hounds, with Jess, with a goodnight kiss from a mother he’ll never know.

“I’m sorry, Dean,” Sam says, tests the words and yes, too heavy, too choked. “I’m so sorry, Baby,” he tries instead, palms on her wheel, feather light.

Dean doesn’t answer.

Neither does Baby.

.

.

The first thing is heat.

A strange, shaded heat.

Heat that is present, but not scorching. Heat that sweats, but doesn’t blister, because there’s something in the way.

(It isn’t suntan lotion.)

The second thing is the smell of leaves and sand, dry stone and wet clay. Pungent.

Dean groans, and then there’s sound. His sound, his voice.

His body creaking and groaning. And water, water running heavy and fast, close by. Rushing in his ears.

Then comes a moment of disturbing surprise, because he might actually be naked.

This last is enough to prise apart his clenched eyelids. There’s leafy dark and sunlight, and when he looks down, clothes.

So, not naked.

In fact, damp clothes, salty and sour and muddy. Sandy clothes.

Clothes he died in. Clothes he should have been obliterated in.

Dean Winchester, who is for the umpteenth time not dead despite popular opinion, lies on the hard ground staring up at deep, cool leaves swaying above him, listens to the rush of a river close enough to taste in the air.

He’s interrupted from his mortal reveries by a loud, rasping cough. Head snaps to the side too fast, unwelcome crick in his neck and strain in his muscles.

From his blurred side angle he sees a woman sitting on the floor, her soft blonde hair half covering her face.

That face. That rosecream skin and those soft lines, a mouth made for smiling and kissing away bruises.

She’s wearing a nightdress, white and dusty from the ground, and her bare feet tentative on the grit beneath them.

“Mom?” Dean says, force of a habit he’s never actually had.

He remembers seeing her exactly like this, all downy as a goose, Zachariah’s heavenly puppet. Those unloving, disappointed eyes.

The woman looks up at him, the same fast twitch of her neck, eyes flashing. Frightened.

She scrambles to her knees, doesn’t care for the stony sting on her bare skin. Glares at him.

“Who are you?” she asks, and it’s a tone Dean knows, but not from that PB and J voice.

It’s a hunter’s suspicion ( _what are you?)_ and Dean heard it in her voice when she was a kid leaving the life but not like this, like a mother.

Like _his_ mother.

“It’s Dean, Mom,” he says, cracked like the ground beneath them. “It’s your Dean.”

(Has a truer sentiment ever passed his lips?)

Her snarling disgust, instantaneous.

“Don’t you dare,” she snaps. “My son is a _little boy_ , you goddamn animal –”

“Mom,” Dean implores, digs his elbows down and pushes himself up to match her, kneeling, hand to his chest like he’s still packing those souls in. Hears a phantom yell of a naked, writhing woman. “Look at me. It’s Dean. Dean Winchester. Son of Mary and John. Born on January 24th, 1979. It was snowing, and you said angels were –”

He runs out of steam and spirit fast, can’t finish the promise, but it’s all there for the taking, three decades of longing with a side of despair. Mary looks at him with eyes clear and strong, reluctant.

 _Please be lying_ , her eyes say, and Dean tries to block the blow of rejection but it sinks so deep and he knows it isn’t personal, _it isn’t personal_. He knows if he woke up in the middle of nowhere with a stranger calling himself Sammy, he’d lose his shit, too, and Sam’s already a grown ass man.

“I’m sorry,” Dean says, helpless to the storm of his bereaved mother’s face.

“I don’t understand,” she says, wretched with loss.

“Me neither,” Dean says, which is true but also false, because somebody told him. Those screams weren’t fiction and she told him.

 _It’s coming_.

But what, fricking miracles?

Mary Winchester is alive and so is Dean, which he supposes makes death-defiance an official genetic trait.

“You died thirty-four years ago,” he says.

“Yellow Eyes,” is Mary’s reply.

Instant and furious.

“Yeah,” Dean replies, but there’s no anger. Vengeance didn’t cool it, but time sure did. Time and new losses and old friends and more enemies.

Bobby and Meg and Alistair and Charlie all bundled into some great chimera of Dean’s ability give a flying fuck these days.

“Where are we?” Mary asks.

“Good question,” Dean snorts. They cast their glances further from each other than they have yet dared, and the ground seems to fall out beneath them.

In fact, only a few feet away, it really _has_ fallen out. A great scoop of the earth’s flesh is missing, and the willow trees currently shading them creak on the edge of the abyss, roots plunging into a river that’s tearing over the precipice and into the deep.

But far, stretching into the horizon, it becomes clear this is no abyss. There’s golden sun and rock and it is dug deep into the earth, and all along its outer rim rivers are flowing, pocketed by willow trees.

Before them unfolds the Grand-Goddamn-Canyon, and together, breathless, they watch, as it slowly, so slowly fills up with water.

.

.

By the time Sam pulls himself out of the Impala, he has cramp in both legs and the shadowy inklings of a migraine blurring his vision. The walk to his room is long – very long, counting the forty minute pause in the library to drink brandy and shout at the books.

In fact, Sam never actually makes it to his room that first night, because he stumbles into his brother’s bedroom instead.

Drops the bottle and glass on the cabinet next to a photo of five year old Sam, probably the only one in existence, and falls face first onto a bed that smells the same as the drive home in the Impala.

Regretful leather and loneliness.

Sam sleeps the slumber of death that night, the first night. Shoes in his feet and sweat sticking his shirt to his back.

Castiel doesn’t sleep, because he doesn’t need to, but also because if he did he would not sleep the merciful slumber of death, but would only traverse the vast skies of creation in search of molecules that feel familiar.

Instead he sits in the War Room of the bunker listening to Sam bellow insults at the Torah and scripts of the Upanishads and the King James Bible, until Sam goes to bed, and then Castiel goes to the library and reads books.

There’s one that stays in his hands longer than the others.

It’s about humanity and monsters and the dirty lines of morality which so baffled him once.

(Which still baffle him now.)

Written by two brothers he never had the sense to seek out when they were alive.

He wonders if they were good men. He wonders if they loved each other as fiercely as his charges love each other. ( _Loved_ each other, he reprimands.)

Wonders, did one go mad with grief at the loss of the other? Were the monsters more frightful when there was only one left to bear witness?

He wonders if the stories even belonged to the brothers at all.

(Probably not).

Whoever they were, though, those Grimm boys sure knew how to spin tales that would make the prophets proud.

Castiel reads it cover to cover and pretends when the Prince kisses Briar Rose out of the thorny ice to be surprised by the tenacity of human romanticism.

He eats up the words greedily, because he knows they aren’t true, not literally, and Death was never a Godfather because Death preceded God. But he was truly a father, more so perhaps than God ever has been, because if there’s one thing Death was it was attentive.

Castiel wonders who reaped Dean in the end, since Death couldn’t.

Then he remembers that Dean won’t have been reaped at all, because Dean isn’t dead, Dean is annihilation incarnate.

He slaps the last page over, closes the book with a loud smack of paper and stares about the library, feels illiterate in the presence of such knowledge, which is less than he holds in one thought and yet so much more than he could ever know.

Castiel listens to the heartbeat of the Bunker, a dim thrumming of energy, most of it dormant, as most places of learning are. Untapped potential chained into the walls.

He waits for Sam to wake up.

.

.

_(The sea will groan, those pines will whisper, that night wind moans through the glowing embers and oh my God I will tell you how to love to be alive.)_

.

.

Dean definitely got the comfiest bed in the Bunker.

Sam almost feels bad for ribbing his brother about being so pleased with the memory foam.

He wakes up reluctantly, so nauseous he doesn’t have it in him to be embarrassed about crawling into his big brother’s bed. Too nauseous to be affected by the twinge of regret when he remembers why embarrassment is a moot point, now.

Pushing himself up to sitting, Sam stares around the room wearing a blanket of passive fondness.

Stares around the room at the idiosyncrasies he has lived with most of his life, laid out unabashedly bare.

A polished armoury decorating the wall; hospital corners on the bed. Tangled wires of headphones; a much maltreated King James Bible on the cabinet.

Sam heaves himself off the bed onto heavy feet, sways in time with the churning of his guts. His fumbling hands find the door handle and his riddled stomach acid is boiling inside him, driving him forward, but he is pulled up short the moment he opens the bedroom door by an irate Angel of the Lord blocking his path.

“You have been asleep for too long,” Castiel says impatiently. “We don’t have time for counterproductive bodily functions.”

Before Sam can back away, Castiel jabs his forehead hard with two fingers, as close to a punishment as the breath of new life can be as it dances over Sam’s senses like sea wind kisses.

Castiel looks as rumpled as he did in the car. The cut on his own lip is still there.

“What time is it?” Sam asks, irritated by the spring clean on his head and his stomach, because it’s leaving room for less manageable concerns than a hangover.

“It is almost eleven in the morning,” Castiel replies, syllables snipped with disapproval, and he grabs Sam’s arm.

With a lurch Sam finds himself standing in the Bunker’s War Room.

“Cas, dammit,” Sam gasps, lunging straight for a chair as his head spins.

Castiel frowns.

“You are no longer physically affected by your excessive alcohol consumption,” he says, sounding accusatory.

“Yeah, but, dude,” Sam winces, digging his fingers into his cheeks. “Not even eleven in the morning? I was asleep for what, twelve hours at most?” he scoffs.

Of course, it’s been a long time since anyone around here slept more than four hours at a time, but still.

Castiel’s been alive for eons. He could stand to wait until Sam has eaten a slice of toast.

“A lot can happen in twelve hours,” Castiel replies darkly.

Resentment burns inside Sam. It’s been burning for a long time and it’s slowly scorching out every piece of goodwill Sam feels towards the living forces of this world.

He knows just how much can happen in twelve hours.

A lot can happen in twelve minutes.

The foundation of his hope, obliterated in less than twelve seconds.

It’s only then, as he shakes his head and turns to make his way to the kitchen that Sam looks at the War Room table.

It’s covered in whirring laptops and broadsheet spreads in a dozen languages.

“What is this?” he asks, picking up the nearest newspaper, a British print, the cover mostly taken up by a large photograph of three dozen spinner dolphins dancing and diving along the Thames River.

Another, written in what looks like Greek, and a photograph of a swollen, ripe olive tree growing out of a large slab of ancient marble.

On the nearest laptop, a video of an ecologist trying to explain why the Okavango Delta has swollen to twice its usual size, when it should be completely dry.

“A lot can happen in twelve hours, Sam,” Castiel repeats. It sounds more like a reprimand than a warning, this time.

Sam looks up at the Angel.

He’s hunched up tighter than Sam has maybe ever seen him, face pinched with disapproval, but it’s a weak mask at best. His eyes are cloudy with sadness and Sam sees it again, the way the Angel had buckled to the ground, gripping his head with both hands and screaming torment as the sun burned bright and young.

“Tell me,” Sam says, determination choking his dry throat.

With meek, soldierly efficiency Castiel rifles through the papers and the laptops laid out orderly, handing over today’s copy of the Washington Post.

“There was some kind of surge in energy last night. Life forms have been cropping up where they don’t belong since yesterday. But it’s been happening for far longer than that.”

“You think –” Sam says.

“Of course,” Castiel interrupts.

“Are they miracles?” Sam asks, glancing over an article that he now realises is a month old, written by a scientist suggesting that there’s been an abrupt surge in polar bear numbers.

In response, Castiel throws a magazine at Sam. It’s written in French, but there’s a photograph filling the inner cover showing the devastation caused by the sudden burst of the molten lavas spilling out into an array of cavernous fields in the space of a few terrifying hours, killing over two dozen people.

“I don’t think these count as divine acts,” Castiel says sharply.

There’s something bent and torn about the way he says it, a twist in the vowels and a click in the consonants that Sam isn’t used to. It twists his stomach up in knots.

Castiel tilts his head, angry hound with the scent of blood touching his tongue.

He sounds like _Dean_ , Sam realises with a lurch in his stomach and for a moment it feels as if the hangover has returned.

He sounds like Dean, sarcastic and thorny and anxious.

He’s emulating the soul he rebuilt like Adam out of clay, perhaps the first soul he ever knew well enough to even know how to emulate. Everything this being learned about humanity came eons before humanity existed.

Everything he learned about _being_ one, though? That was all Dean.

By the way Castiel immediately returns to rifling through newspapers and fishing out data, it’s clear he doesn’t really know exactly where he’s stealing these mannerisms from. He’s collecting Dean in memories and instead of storing them like a person in mourning he’s wearing them like lucky charms.

It fills Sam with a vast, adoring love that he doesn’t quite recognise. Affection and a fierce desire to shield this creature from the hurts that surround them.

He stamps it down fast, though, that urge to bundle Cas into a hug he won’t understand or take pleasure in. It hurts as much as it heals.

“Floods and raining fire is kind of God’s style, isn’t it?” Sam asks, instead.

(Because Castiel, he might have pulled Dean out of Hell, might have left a soul deep stamp of ownership on him when he rebuilt him from the inside out, but Sam has been learning Dean for over three decades, now. He can be Dean, too.)

Castiel bristles at that. There is no pretending that Chuck is nothing like the Father Castiel has been searching for, not half the God he envisioned when he dropped all loyalties to put his restored faith in Him.

There is no pretending that Castiel probably doesn’t know his Father any better than Sam does, by now.

(And it hurts, Sam knows this, because Sam is a human being who is barely a fraction of a blink in this universe’s lifetime and Castiel existed before the specks of gold and splintered stardust that make up humanity were even stars at all.)

“This is not divine vengeance,” Castiel corrects Sam hotly. “This is chaos.”

Sam restrains himself from asking what exactly Castiel thinks a plague of locusts was, other than absolute pandemonium.

.

.

( _Yeah, well, I don’t want to_ , Dean said, years ago. He meant it more than he understood at the time. _I don’t want to_ , the lingering sentiment of this family, the steadfast sediment of Dean Winchester’s existence. _Of course I could do it alone, but I don’t want to_.)

.

.

( _I don’t want to either_ , Sam thinks quietly. Locks it up inside a box in his head where the scars of Lucifer reside.)

.

.

“What year is this?” Mary asks calmly after a few minutes.

They’re sitting with their hot, dry feet in the gushing river, sheltered by the looming willow tree that smells of moss and shadow. Dean’s shoes have been tossed aside.

Mary, of course, doesn’t have any shoes, which is problematic at best when stranded in the desert.

Dean can’t quite look at his Mom for longer than a few seconds at a time. He can’t look away from her for more than a minute, either, though. The twinge of headache is pulsing against the inside of his forehead and where he’s leaning back against his palms, his fingers are scant inches from his mother’s.

Mary had looked briefly like she’d wanted to reach out to him in shock, once they realised just where this water was flowing to. But her arms had flinched back even as she leaned towards Dean and it hadn’t felt right to push for a hug from a Mom who, against every fibre of his being to accept it, is _younger_ than him.

Dean kicks a splash of water up with his feet.

“Well, if it’s when I think it is,” he says, tongue curling inside his mouth at the thought he might be wrong, “It’s 2016.”

He sees her shoulders slump a little further. Mary lets out a long, shaky breath.

“You _think_ it is?” she says, because she’s a hunter and _fuck_ if that doesn’t sting like hell.

Dean nods. The water tugging at his feet and ankles is icy cold and blissful. A part of him, a very small insufferable part of him, wants to let go of this rocky ground beneath him, sink into this current and let it carry him into the break of the waterfall.

“I might be, uh,” he stalls, kicking the water hard enough to splash up to his knees, over the rolled up jeans cuffs. Mary turns to look at him, her jade eyes piercing what meagre resolve he’s clinging to. “Missing time.”

He can see her disbelief like a physical presence, her bright impatience and torrid will a force he had admired when she hadn’t looked so much like the Mom he remembered.

“How?” she asks suspiciously.

Dean clenches his teeth together, feels a tight lock in his jaw and wishes that were enough to keep him from telling her the truth.

But Dean, he’s never lied to his mother, not once in all the four years and ten months he knew her for.

“I sort of died,” he says, tries to hurry it, like if he loses enough consonants to go with it, it won’t be so bad.

Mary’s spine straightens, her body leans just like before but this time one hand clamps tight around Dean’s forearm. She’s here, really here, gripping him like an angel ready to raise him from perdition.

“You died?”

She sounds furious, sound wretched and upset and her eyes, they’re so young, so confused as Dean looks into those glassy green mirrors and sees himself.

“Maybe,” is all he can think to say. “I was supposed to, but. I don’t know. Maybe I _am_ dead.”

The thought, once it occurs, seems blindingly obvious.

Of _course_ he’s dead. He’s in heaven, with his Mom.

Maybe that’s the miracle, here. Maybe Chuck or Amara found a way to rescue his soul from the obliteration of all those other ticking bombs inside him.

Hell, maybe _Cas_ heard him in that last second, the scream of his name into the good night. Maybe Cas heard him, heard him and saved him, just like every other time. So Dean’s just in Heaven, just here, sitting at the edge of the Grand Canyon with his Mom, sheltered by a willow tree with his feet cooling in a fresh, salty river.

(Stranger things have been known to happen to the likes of a Winchester, after all.)

“Cas?” he says abruptly, louder than he means to, hoarse and grateful.

Mary’s eyes narrow as Dean stares up through the filtering leaves of the willow towards the sky.

“Castiel?” Dean says again.

The name tastes different on his tongue with three syllables. It feels more like a prayer, like this.

“Who or what is Castiel? Dean,” Mary sighs, exasperated. “I really don’t think we’re dead.”

She gestures to the Grand Canyon, flooding with water and he thinks, well, fair, that isn’t an easy one to explain.

Dean purses his lips and scowls at the leaves above them.

Beyond their reach, the sky is a searing shade of blue. Dean can feel their mother’s eyes on his face, knows she’s studying the crow’s feet at his eyes, the stubble on his jaw, trying to figure it out in her head.

“Thirty-seven,” he says, hoarse and quiet.

He hasn’t thought about it in a while; the number is a weak hit in the gut,now. He forces himself not to look at her, not to see her shock, her devastation.

Instead, he answers her question.

“Castiel is an angel,” he says, gives a wry grin that tastes bitter. “Guess  you were right all along about them spying on me.”

She laughs a little, even though she doesn’t get the joke because the joke is the end of times take one.

It’s a choked sound,anyway, because for MAry, angels are fairy tale wishes and the apocalypse is a fable.

“Yes, they are real,” Dean says for the umpteenth time in his life.”Most of them are dicks.”

When he finally brings himself to look at his mother, she looks distrustful for the first time since she realised this stranger really is her _son_.

“It’s true,” he says. “Sorry to burst your bubble but eternity in Yahweh’s absent Glory really got to their heads.”

He frowns, corrects himself.

“To be honest a lot of them are dead now, I think.”

The war of trust and need in Mary’s face looks so fleetingly and desperately like Sam, Dean feels his chest contract around his lungs.

“Castiel is your friend?" she asks, eventually.

Dean feels the smile before it breaks through his frown. It’s warm  relief and it makes his fists clench.

“Yeah,” he replies. “Normally he, uh, answers when I call.”

He’s not sure why he blushes at that, but heat floods his cheeks, different to the scorch of the sun above them.

“Answers?” Mary asks, tilting her head.

“He’s an angel,” Dean says, flat and embarrassed. “He can fly. It’s less cool than it sounds.”

This isn’t strictly true, but Dean can’t possibly quantify the sheer cliff face of frustration that possesses him every time Cas flutters away before Dean is ready, how disorientating it is to call for help, find himself unanswered, then be so unexpectedly interrupted mid-sentence by the angel’s sudden presence.

Mary nods, like he’s making any sense whatsoever.

“And you think he had something to do with this,” he says, gesturing to themselves, so the Canyon.

Dean lets out a long sigh, sits up properly to rub his hands over his face. Mary’s hand, the one that had grabbed his arm, now rests gently on his shoulder.He takes her hand in his, feels the smallness of her fingers that had felt so big and comforting pressed to his brow when he got sick as a kid.

“If we’re not dead,” he says, but he’s not got a follow up. “Mom?” he says instead, voice shakes because it feels like a brand new word.

“Yes, Dean?” she asks, holding his hand light. She smiles, apples and cinnamon.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” he confesses.

Laughter, full of relief and agreement, bursts out of Mary’s warm smile. Dean laughs, too, a dry thudding laugh that might once have been hopeless, but how could it be, now?

Hopeless is the tench of ash and dirt in the night, his dad crying and Sammy squirming and the lady from the ambulances asking if he feels cold.

But Mary Winchester is here, the fire is gone and clearly up is down and the world is fucked but this is not _hopeless_.

Dean laughs again, louder this time. He reaches out with both arms and for the first time in thirty-three years, he hugs his mother.

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.

Castiel watches Sam sift through file after file after file, the stooping slope of his neck, anxious fingers in his hair.

Sam wears defeat differently to Dean, he notes to himself.

Dean’s hurt had always been like a forest fire; it burned indiscriminately, feeding itself into a frenzy and leaving a blaze of devastation in the smoking aftermath.

Sam’s isn’t like that, though.

Sam’s pain is cold and poisonous, snaking itself around him until he can’t hide it anymore. Castiel watches it happen from across the War Room.

Sam flurries from collating data to trashing it with rapid efficiency, quiet and solemn, shrinking into himself  like an imploding star.

“Have you found something else?” Sam asks without looking up, Castiel approaches, carrying coffee that Sam accepts with a small murmur of thanks.

“I’m going to take a look at some of the sites,” Castiel says. “There may be evidence of what’s behind this.”

Sam snorts. For a moment he looks up at the angel,looks ready to say something undoubtedly mean and impatient. He appears to think the better of it, though.

He coughs awkwardly, swills his coffee in his hands and nods, head bowed.

“Good idea,” he mumbles. “I’ll keep looking here.”

He sounds choked. Castiel, remembering the resentment with which he had been addressed in the face of Dean’s tears, leaves before he can be dismissed.

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.

Sam looks up from his coffee and mutters, “Cas?” but the War Room is empty.

A laugh bubbles up out of the disappointment he feels at the angel’s departure.

“Sure,” he says, breath, heavy in his throat.

The quiet of the Bunker looms threateningly.

The scorching memory of Dean is everywhere and Sam falls into a chair with the weight of it. He feels lost, the same way he did when Purgatory swallowed Dean and Cas without warning and Sam realises what exactly that strings cut floating is, now.

There’s no body to bury.

Without a grave to dig or a pyre to burn Sam feels suspended, a ghost ship anchorless and rudderless. He wonders if this is what it would have been like if Cas hadn’t been standing too close to an exploding Dick Roman, too.

There’s no closure without a funeral and there’s no realisation without a corpse.

Briefly, as he tips coffee into his dry mouth and stares unseeing towards the stairs that lead out of the Bunker, Sam imagines conducting a memorial of some kind; maybe lighting candles and carving a tombstone.

Another laugh rises up inside Sam, only this one tastes like vomit.

“His stomach convulses and Sam barely makes it to the trash can before he heaves out half a cup of coffee, the brandy Castiel cured him of and a burning mouthful of bile.

The taste makes him retch again, tears of effort in his eyes.

(I _t’ll pass, it’ll pass_ , Dean would say when he was a kid, a hand on his back and another on his belly he cried into the toilet bowl.)

Sam gulps stinging air and shivers.

He glances behind him at the smashed cup and spilled coffee that had fallen out of his hands in his rush to the trash.

Breathing slowly, Sam gets back up off his knees and heads for the bathroom.

Brushing his teeth is laborious.He moves on autopilot from room to room, wondering where Castiel is, wondering what’s happening outside the safe confines of the Bunker.

Sam cleans up the porcelain shards and the coffee with slow, delicate movements. He collects every piece in his palms and drops them into the trash along with half the lining of his stomach, before throwing the whole can into the dumpster out the back, behind the garage.

( _What happens when it’s full?_ Dean had asked and Sam had laughed and said something about special rates for magical garbage disposal.)

He’s about to go back inside when a movement out of the corner of his eye makes him tense.

Sam whips around in a half crouch.

His hands are ready at his sides but he’s so very aware of how defenceless he is right now, no gun and no knife, hell, not even a handful of salt; he’s vulnerable and ain’t that the truth of it, Dean gone for twenty-four hours and Sam’s about to get killed taking out the trash.

He stares at the corner of the building that hides his would-be attacker, the prickling of his spine loud in his veins.

“Who’s there?” he asks, just to imagine Dean berating him because however much he hated it, at least Dean’s protection was consistently too much and too loud. Silence swells, followed by a cotton dry voice.

“Don’t shoot,” the voice says, the letters lost in Louisiana lilt.

Recognition bites her jaws hard around Sam’s heart and he cocks his head, frowning in confusion.

“Who are you?” he asks.

When he leans forward into view, the vampire is wearing the same insufferable half smile he wore as he boldly shook San’s hand the day they met.

“Benny,” he says, stuck between relief and horror that tug together at his heartstrings.

“Don’t suppose you could help a brother out?” Benny says, hands raised in peaceful surrender. “I am mighty lost.”

.

.

( _Real wolves at your door, with blood on their tongues. Now what you gonna do with your days left in the sun?_ )

.

.

Castiel goes to New York, first, where a field of lilacs have sprouted across Time Square, right up through the pavement.

A man stands on a box surrounded by a mass of enraptured listeners.

“These are the signs!” he cries, tears glittering like triumphant, doomsday diamonds on his face and his hands in the air like he might grasp the clouds. “It is beginning and He is wrathful!”

Castiel considers calling out to ask what wrath is to be found in flowerbeds, hears Dean’s approval in every word, but he holds his tongue.

Instead, he walks the cordoned perimeter, listening to the bemused disgruntlement of the police officers stationed to guard the lilac miracle.

There’s no scent of sulphur, no tingle of magic. There’s no scent of sulphur, no tingle of divinity. There is only the perfume of flowers and, to Castiel’s selfish delight, the zooming buzz of honey bees feasting on the pollen.

He goes to London, to Munich, to Johannesberg, chasing miracle after devastation after miracle. Everywhere he goes, there are only two scents in the air: the bright ocean breeze of life and the sickly hollow dank of death.

He goes to Paris, to the risen Seine and the sudden lurch in premature births that has left the city wailing and the hospitals overcrowded.

He stands outside the Notre Dame amidst crowds of baffled citizens and tourists and finds a very new miracle entirely.

He walks to the bench, muted by wonder and fear, looks down at the angel sitting comfortably with his arms stretched out against the backrest, looking smug and endearing.

“Castiel,” Balthazar says, in a tone Castiel has never heard before.

.

.

 


	2. Do I Cross Your Mind?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, quotes belong to Birds of Chicago. Also, thanks for the reviews, lovelies!

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( _The moon is sharp tonight, the stars are little knives, hide your eyes._ )

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Faced with the possibility of heatstroke, unable to drink from the river that’s as salty as the Dead Sea while their lips start to crack and their eyelids start to droop, Dean and Mary decide it’s time to leave their willow shelter and search for answers.

Mary accepts Dean’s shirt to cover her bare arms, looks guiltier by the second at the sight of Dean wearing only a t-shirt, his equally pale skin exposed to the blistering sun.

She refuses shoes and socks, however, which Dean can’t bring himself to push the matter on because they’re old and used and he feels kind of gross putting them back on himself.

They walk what from the sun’s trajectory they believe is North.

Slowly they make tracks, Mary cautiously barefoot over burning rocky ground, Dean’s eyes steady on the empty horizon.

He’s resigned himself to the high likelihood that they are, in fact, alive.

Cas’ silence is troublesome, though, and Dean tries to mask his fear with grumbling about lizards. Mary shoots him worried looks, her cheeks pink and shiny, walking slowly to avoid the sharpest stones.

“You’re a hunter, then,” she says after a quiet, gasping twenty minutes.

Dean clenches his jaw.

“You don’t sound surprised.”

Mary shrugs one shoulder, apathetic.

“Can’t say I am,” she admits. “After Yellow Eyes, I suppose you would always have found out eventually. The Campbells don’t let things lie for long.”

Dean feels a surge of sadness, remorseful at the thought of telling his mother it wasn’t her family that did this to her sons, but her husband.

She looks over at him. Her breaths are as loud as her curiosity.

“When did they tell you?” she asks, sounding every bit like she never wants to know.

Dean swallows. His tongue sticks to the roof of his parched mouth.

“They didn’t,” he says, the words tapped consonants behind his teeth.

Mary stops short, staring at her son.

She’s flushed and sweating and she looks very sad. Her lips are parted in silent shame and her eyes are pink at the rims with tears.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

Dean’s brow puckers. He’s never truly denied the ferocious love he has kept harboured for his father, hasn’t been able to quell it with anything, not even the blame and pain of mourning childhood.

Now, though, shame sticks in his throat, to see his mother’s young face willing him to assuage her fears.

“Dad figured it out,” he admits, hates that it tastes like embarrassment.

The weak hope in Mary’s expression crumples into regret.

“When?”

“‘Bout six months after.”

A sound falls out of Mary’s mouth, louder than a gasp, less than a cry.

Fingers over her lips, shaking, her chin tucked into her chest as if to trap the surprise.

“And he told you boys?”

Dean smiles, small nod towards the ground.

“We kept it from Sammy for as long as we could. But he always was a smart kid.”

It’s an apology he’s been trying to make ever since he told Sam the truth about what’s out there. He hopes she hears it because he can’t finish the sorry, can’t admit the depth of the disappointment she must be feeling. She looks at him solemnly.

She looks at him like she wants to look away. Her hair is thin spider silk in the sunlight, her nightgown is dusty and she holds his shirt tight around her shoulders.

“But you?” she asks.

The air glitters loudly, the wind is long and loud.

“You missed a lot, Mom,” Dean says. He turns around, then, to hide from the hurt in her face.

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Sam’s heart, a jackhammer against his ribcage.

(There is nothing more alive than fear.)

He stands tall and tired, loosens his fists. Benny smiles at him, an apex predator’s smile, as if he finds the mouse too cute to eat.

“Thank you kindly, Sam,” he says with rolling vowels.

His skin is ashy and he walks with one hand on his gut.

“There’s no blood bank in here, you know,” Sam says warily.

Benny chuffs a laugh. Sam holds the Bunker door open, tries not to be too obvious as he leans back to let the vampire pass.

“I already ate,” Benny says, is already waving down Sam’s posturing before he can open his mouth. “I didn’t kill no-one, Sam. Now, where’s your brother at?”

The gut punch nearly floors Sam.

The vampire shuffles through the Bunker towards the War Room, looking up and down like he’s walked into a new dimension.

“Dean?” he calls like an accusation, effortful and expectant.

Sam feels the lumps of malignant grief clogging his throat as he says, “He’s dead.”

Benny pauses, stumbles mid-step.

He turns full body, wide eyes and open lips, looks at Sam properly for the first time, takes in his tight shoulders and bruised red eyes.

“He can’t be,” Benny says.

Sam almost laughs, because only Dean could collect about him such a faithful band of apostles, to stay true even after he’s decapitated them.

“And yet he is,” Sam says and for one horrific moment he finds himself feeling _smug_ at being able to prove the vampire wrong.

Then he feels the smirk of disdain on his face, sees the confused hurt in Benny’s eyes and feels an overwhelming urge to eat his gun.

Day One AD and Sam’s already using Dean’s death to get one over on his friends.

( _Nice one, Sammy. Real fucking gentleman, aren’t you?_ )

Benny makes an aborted movement with his hands, a flinch of open palms.

It looks far too much like he was about to reach out to him, maybe even _hug_ him and Sam isn’t ready for bereavement cuddles, least of all from a vampire. Hell, he hadn’t even let Cas hug him, though the angel had visibly attempted more than once.

“I’m real sorry about that, Sam,” Benny says with unbearable sincerity. He walks, stilted arthritic back towards the doors, actually does take Sam’s arm as he walks past, holds it for less than a second in hollow solidarity.

Sam bites his lip.

He owes this vampire nothing. Benny _chose_ to stay in Purgatory. He chose to let Dean do what he did, knowing exactly what the consequences would be.

His claim on Sam’s brother was nothing in the vast chasm of Dean’s life. His grief would be a fleeting regret, soon to pass. It wasn’t up to Sam to -

“ _Wait_ ,” Sam groans, goes for command and comes up desperate. He turns to see Benny a bare step from the door, his shoulders hunched. “Just because Dean isn’t here,” Sam says reluctantly. “Doesn’t mean you can’t stay here.”

Benny looks back over his shoulder, full of distrust.

Sam shrugs awkwardly, too dehydrated to cry and too sad not to.

“He’d never forgive me if I turned you away.”

It’s very true and it’s such a lie, because Dean would raise all Hell if he saw Sam turn a friend aside, but he’s also yet to find a single thing that Dean couldn’t forgive him for, eventually.

(Won’t ever find that line now because the line is atoms on the other end of the universe, along with the rest of Sam’s heart.)

“You don’t have to -”

“Yes,” Sam interrupts impatiently. “I really do, Benny.”

He holds out a hand in truce, which Benny takes.

His palm is clammy cold when they shake and Sam gestures towards the War Room.

“Don’t know if you’ve caught anything else that’s going on,” Sam says as he leads the way to the table.

Benny whistles, whispers _Jesus Christ_ in his godless voice and settles himself down in a chair.

“I really don’t have any blood for you, Benny,” Sam says, refusing to apologise for not being a vampire B&B.

Benny’s smile is wan as he runs a hand through his hair beneath his flat cap and says, “Don’t need any blood.” Then, only half a laugh in his voice, “Could murder a bite of eggs and toast, though.”

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End of times is full of jokes. This isn’t one of them.

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.

Dean had forgotten how silently his mother could cry.

He’s imitated her and he’s idolised her and in all that adoration, he forgot those silent tears, the way they would drip from her jaw unchecked as she washed the dishes.

(He’d realise, later, it was so she could lie about getting soap in her eyes.)

He listens to the silence of his mother’s sadness as together they limp towards the horizon.

The desert is unforgiving and Dean’s fresh out of pleading anyhow. He throws a quick prayer to Chuck, just in case, but it looks like He’s turned His ears off again.

Dean tries to think of something nice to say, something comforting, yet all he has is loss and grit.

_Dad’s dead, by the way._

_So’s the man who was more of a father to me than your husband ever was._

_So are all of my friends._

_So are all of your family._

Beside him, his mother makes a hitching sound that means she’s stopped crying. He would never have remembered that, he thinks, but he hears it once and he’s four years old again, remembers that’s the sign that his mom is ready to be hugged again.

He’s not sure he’ll survive hugging her, feeling the bird bones of her shoulders in his arms. He reaches out instead to take her hand in his.

She doesn’t respond at first. Hot embarrassment rushes through him and he drops her hand quickly, briefly glad of the sunburn on his ears to mask his blush.

He bites his lip, curses himself.

At the last moment, however, she snatches his hand back. She clasps his fingers and squeezes them tightly.

He tries very hard not to think of Ben. Nonetheless, the thoughts come unbidden.

(His love for that kid had been nothing if not inescapable.)

“John’s gone, isn’t he?” Mary asks, pulling Dean out of the frying pan of regret, straight into the fire of guilt.

“Yeah,” he says. “The demon that uh, he uh…”

He’s never felt more cowardly than at the rush of relief he feels when Mary squeezes his hand again as if to say _, Don’t worry_ , as if to say _You don’t need to explain_.

“And Yellow Eyes?” she asks, doesn’t even know the name of the demon that killed her husband, that killed _her_.

“Azazel,” Dean tells her, tastes sulphur in his mouth at the very thought of him. “We got him,” he reassures her, even manages a sweaty, bitter smile. “I killed him.”

For a moment, Mary looks disbelieving, like she wants to ask _how_. Dean speaks before she can because that’s a conversation he’s not ready for, not in this heat, this sun, this desolate landscape that stretches around them in every starving direction.

“Did you ever know about the Men of Letters?” he asks.

It’s not what he means to say. Mary’s brow creases thoughtfully and a quirk of a smile ghosts across her face.

“Sure,” she says. “Well, _heard_ of them. Rumours at best, really.”

Dean laughs, imagines not for the first time locking Samuel Campbell and Henry Winchester in a room together just to see what would happen.

(Nothing good, that’s for sure.)

“Dad’s father was one,” he says.

Mary turns her head fast, pulls back and grips tighter.

“What?”

She looks scandalised.

Dean wonders how he’s going to explain that this is probably the tamest secret in their archive.

“Yeah. He uh, he never walked out on Dad, like he always thought,” Dean says. Tries not to sound proud but it comes out anyway.

“That’s…” Mary begins, only to come up short. Dean chuckles dryly.

“I know,” he agrees. “Small world.”

“Doesn’t feel like it right-” Mary says, casting her gaze around the vast emptiness around them. She loses track, voice drifting into a silent frown as she stares past Dean at something on his other side. “What the…”

Dean whips around, his head spinning in the heat; feels his stomach plummet a hundred feet into the ground.

A few metres away, the ground is not caramel dirt. It’s been charred. It’s blackened rot plastered into the grit.

A large pair of wings, stretching across the ground, bigger than any Dean has ever seen before.

They move closer, mother and son. They stand together at the edge of the closest wing.

“What is it?” Mary asks.

Dean quells the nausea in his gut.

“It’s an angel,” he says, though without the body it’s hard to feel anything but violently sick. “A dead one.”

Mary crouches down, reaches one hand out to trace the black char of the largest wingspan. When she brings her hand up to inspect it, her fingers are wet with blood.

“My God,” she whispers.

Before them, a crack splits down the centre of the wings, where the body should lie. The earth splits like hairs, thin splinters curling at the edges.

Dean takes Mary by the shoulders, pulls her up and away.

“We’ve got to go,” he says, can’t quite justify the clenching panic he feels building in his limbs even as a deep tectonic rumble starts to grind beneath them.

His vision shakes in time with the earth beneath their feet.

Further field, all around them, he can see more wings appearing, scorched into the ground with no bodies to accompany them.

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

His head is pounding and the swirl of dehydration is doing truly terrible things to his stomach.

He pulls at Mary’s arm and she stumbles.

“Shit!” she cries, looks down at her cut feet, pulls a stone out of her heel.

“Mom?” Dean says, “I’m sorry.”

He barely means it as he crouches to hoist her into his arms, as she berates him with weak need but there’s no time for arguing and there’s no room for her pride.

The vivid blue of the sky is sharp in his eyes. There’s the hiss of fire in a dead grate, of rattlesnakes, of wind in nonexistent trees. The rumble of wrath beneath them echoes.

Fear ploughs through Dean’s every instinct and even as exhaustion begs, he starts to run.

He staggers over the rough terrain and he pants in the merciless heat.

Behind them, a crackle of electricity.

He has no idea who those wings belonged to but he has no interest in finding out.

He hears his mother’s breath, he feels her hands gripping the tight skin of his sunburnt neck. He runs away even as a voice yells his name, ten voices, a multitude. They say his name, they say more.

( _Dean Winchester is saved!_ )

He’d never heard it before, the unbearable yearning of angel radio. It’s more than he can carry in his heart and he thinks about Anna locked in a mental hospital and he thinks _yeah, I understand now_ as Mary cringes in his arms, incoherently yelling, pleading for that noise to stop.

( _Dean Winchester is saved!_ )

Pain shoots through Dean’s knees before he realises he’s fallen.

He holds the trembling body of his mother in his arms, his head curled against her temple and her arms around his neck. They are alive, he knows they are, and now they’ll die, they’ll die without knowing why or who or what.

But death is better than annihilation, he tells himself, and maybe they’ll go to Heaven now, maybe this was just one last test.

“Dean!” a voice says, closer than the Heavenly Hosts.

There’s a hand on his head that isn’t his mother’s. Fingers grip his hair, yank hard and through the tears he sees a face looking down at him, devastatingly young, soft eyes and pale skin.

“Run, Dean!” Adam shouts, or perhaps it’s Michael.

Whoever it is inside that young, battered meatsuit, with a great burst of his incandescent wings light fills the air with ten hundred thousand volts and Dean closes his eyes, holds Mary tighter.

Then he is gone, once more.

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( _Th_ _ere are no days and no nights, just messages in reflected light._ )

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When Earth wasn’t ready yet, when they were playing the waiting game and the established rules were clear and weak, like thin sheets of glass, Castiel was a guardian of Kings.

He sat beside the kneeling Yeshua as he wept for all he had not achieved. He held the hand of a boy that would chart the stars. He healed the wounds of a tyrant that would commit terrible acts of murder.

He was indiscriminate in his attention.

Balthazar was, in turn, indiscriminate in his judgement of Castiel.

Knowing what he knows now, Castiel might have described him as the monkey on his back.

At the time, he had been simply a restive watchfulness, haunting Castiel’s every move over the plains of Earth.

He wears that same look as Castiel takes a seat beside him on a bench outside Notre Dame. It’s a teasing, unholy look.

“What have you done now?” Balthazar drawls, the corners of his mouth pulled upwards.

“I’ve done nothing,” Castiel retorts, ruffled by the accusation. “What are you doing here?”

“Here?” his fellow angel asks. “You mean, _alive_? Why, Castiel, it’s almost as if you haven’t missed me at all.”

About them, the Parisian crowds cluster and reform in wriggling, unnerved herds.

Castiel watches a man carrying a toddler, her hands clutching his collar and her face hiding in his neck as she cries.

“How did you get here?” he asks instead, to which Balthazar only laughs. “Balthazar,” Castiel says, warning bells and impatience. “I need to know.”

“Join the club, little one,” Balthazar says snidely. “I haven’t the faintest idea who saw fit to bring me back. Clearly whoever it is holds a severe grudge, though, if they’re going to do it just in time for everything to go to shit.”

He’s not the Balthazar that Castiel once knew.

_That_ Balthazar carried no hidden blades; had no chips on his shoulders nor spite on his tongue.

_That_ Balthazar was a duck’s back and the follies of others were cool, clear water.

This Balthazar wears anger like a cloak. Castiel can feel it, a vengeful and petulant shroud.

“Have you seen anyone else?” he asks.

Balthazar sneers out at the hordes of humans like they are hornets in a cage. Castiel doesn’t think he’s ever seen Balthazar look at anything like that before.

It’s a disquieting thing to see.

“Not one single Grace,” the angel replies. He’s wearing the vessel he died in, looks bedraggled, sleepless. “But I heard them.”

He taps his temple wisely, then for good measure he taps Castiel’s, too.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Castiel says, which is true. The songs of the angels have been lost in the void ever since Castiel heard the burning of Dean Winchester’s soul splitting atoms into oblivion.

“She is Fallen,” Balthazar announces, sermon solemn, like the monks he used to mock. “Dean Winchester is saved.”

Castiel grimaces. He heard that one years ago. It echoed across the aged skies, his brothers and sisters celebrating his triumph. And Dean Winchester, the stranger he knew better than any angel, moonlight wet against pools of blood and sinew.

“Thy Kingdom Come,” Balthazar also says.

When he smiles he bares his teeth, a snarling dog.

“That’s what you heard?” Castiel asks.

He strains to hear even a trace of his fellow angels but there is only the wind, decorated with the tears of mothers and fathers in young torment across all of Paris.

“Rumour has it you met our Father, little one,” Balthazar says, instead.

“Who told you that?”

“A bird,” Balthazar teases. “Because I’ve got to say, Castiel. This has His fingerprints all over it.”

“Our Father is gone,” Castiel says, feels more like he’s repenting, smells the flowers of Gethsemane all over again.

“What do you mean?” Balthazar asks.

He knows, he can sense it just like Castiel, an inexplicable loss, the nucleus of His absence.

“He is dead,” Castiel spits like a curse word. It tastes of poison and unripe lemons.

He feels keenly the loss of his hope, begotten by desperation. They are all dead, now.

The Almighty Father, the Morning Star, the Righteous Man.

A hand clasps the back of his head. Somewhere in the remnants of Jimmy Novak’s long gone memories, this body recalls doing the same gesture to a young, weeping Claire in solace.

Balthazar nudges him to his feet, takes his shoulder and leans in close.

As their wings take flight together, Castiel hears his old friend say,

“So was I.”

.

.

( _Sunlight through the window, it is not the same_.)

.

.

The woman lies on the ground, bathed in dark old blood. She’s naked, heaving.

Her hair is matted and her hands shake in manacles that keep her pinned tight to the ground.

Dean wakes up beside her, sees tears slips silently down her temples. Her breaths are broken with shudders and her lips open and close without speaking.

He sits up, reaches for her. The floor is hard and her skin is feverish.

When he touches the iron clamped around one wrist, she flinches.

“Don’t!” she cries.

Her voice is deep, like an earthquake, like the sea.

Her eyes are milky lilac.

“You’re bleeding,” he says, to which she laughs, a shade shy of hysterical.

“Your heart is very loud,” she says. Her teeth are pink with blood. “You have so little belief.”

Dean pulls back. With a strangled wail she contorts where she lies, her back arching. From inside her pregnant stomach, the tiny shape of a hand presses.

“I can’t do everything,” she whimpers.

It sounds like an apology, though for what Dean has no clue.

He puts a hand over her brow to wipe the bloody sweat away. It sticks to his hand like honey.

“Have you seen a woman here?” he asks. “Blonde hair, green eyes -”

“Mary Campbell is alive,” the woman says, gasping. Another tear leaks down into her sweaty hair. “So are you.”

Dean frowns, looks around this windowless cell, the light that comes from... _her_ , he realises. She is not lit upon. Rather, she is light. Her skin is dark, has been mottled with punishment; there is blood in her eyes and she is utterly radiant.

“I don’t feel alive,” he tells her with an uncomfortable laugh.

“You never did,” she tells him.

Dean scowls. His protest gets stuck in his throat.

She still looks the familiar, just like last time. She _feels_ familiar. She feels familiar like he thinks Cassie Robinson might do, if he saw her again. Like Lisa Braeden would.

“Who are you?” he asks.

Pain shreds the woman’s reply into a wail. Her tied down limbs flail and her spine arches. The light expands from inside her and Dean holds her hand tight, closes his eyes and yells out her pain, too.

Yells the same way he always meant to after taking on Cain’s Mark, but never quite found the voice for.

When the ringing stops, when his own voice fails, he’s still holding a woman’s hand.

It isn’t a bleeding, naked stranger anymore, though.

“ _Dean? Dean, wake up. That’s it. Wake up now, Dean._ ”

Dean blinks, eyes glazed, to a fuzzy tumble of gold.

“Mmm?” he hums, but before the right word can find footing in his mouth, the voice continues.

“That’s right, it’s Mary. I’m here.”

Dean frowns.

_Mary?_ No, that’s not -

“Officer, thank you so much for your help.”

A man’s voice joins in the buzz around them, replies to the sugary gratitude with, “Sure thing, ma’am. You sure your brother’s ok?”

“Absolutely,” Mary says.

Even through the cloudy layers of confusion, Dean can tell it’s a lie.

Pushing himself further upright, he realises he’s been propped up against the side of a car, legs splayed. A police car, to be precise.

There’s a police officer crouched in front of him and beside him, his mother.

“We’ll drive you back to town,” the officer says.

Dean tries to read his badge, but before he can make out more than _B-A_ the guy stands, helps Mary hoist Dean to his shaky feet.

“Thank you again, officer,” Mary says, sickly sweet and nervous.

There’s a second police officer staring at them from the driver’s seat as they clamber into the back of the car.

Dean stares bemused out of the window at the dry, angel-less landscape as it rolls past.

“Officer Balton and his partner here found us, Dean,” Mary says in a soothing tone.

Officer Balton, an acne-scarred young man with a smile that reminds Dean of Garth, nods at him.

“Your sister’s mighty brave,” Balton says, sounding awestruck enough to make Dean feel queasy. “We saw you a mile off and when we got here she was cool as a cucumber. Well,” he chuckles awkwardly. “In her temper, at least. This sun’s a punisher. But don’t worry, we’ll get you guys to a clinic in Albuquerque.

“Probably be a bit crowded, what with all these electrical storms causing a riot, but you’ll be just fine.”

“ _Albuquerque_?” Dean grunts, gives his mother a suspicious glare.

Mary’s shiny with sunburn, still wearing his shirt and no shoes.

His own skin feels ready to split all over and Dean swallows down the urge to throw up all over the backseat.

“That’s right, Dean, you remember?” Mary asks, running a hand over his sweaty hair. He flinches and she pulls back, guilty.

She leans closer, wraps her arms around Dean as if to hug him. His face is in her damp hair. He knows he’s imagining the smell of flowers because she’s been sweating just as much as him, but he doesn’t care. She feels undeniably familiar, small as she is in his arms.

He’s so lost in the shattering relief of being hugged by his mother, albeit in the back of a police car in New Mexico without a clue as to how they got there, he almost misses her whisper tickling his peeling ear.

“I think that angel sent us here. I think he saved us.”

Dean does not have words for how unlikely it is that Adam Milligan _or_ the Archangel Michael will have wanted to save Dean Winchester, after what he has done. He hugs her tighter instead, lets her hold onto the thought that her first ever encounter with an angel wasn’t the son of her husband by another woman, or the angel that wanted to wear her own firstborn to the Prom against his will.

“Maybe,” he murmurs.

She lets go. He feels the loss keenly, even though his skin is screaming against the physical contact and his guts are boiling inside him.

“We’ve had a fair few strays turn up now,” Officer Balton says, wearing a kind smile that Dean feels should never be directed at anyone younger than twelve. “There’s a motel that’s agreed to take them all in while they get sorted. It ain’t much, but it’ll be a place to rest your head after a doctor’s seen to you.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Mary says before Dean can retort how little chance there is that they will be staying in Albuquerque longer than the five minutes it takes to see off the police. “Thank you so much.”

The officer, who is quite clearly taking far too much interest in Mary to be doing any of this out of the kindness of his heart alone, grins. Beside him, Dean sees his partner roll his eyes.

“And you don’t have any identification whatsoever?” the driver asks coolly. The air conditioning in the car almost drowns out his voice. He licks his lips and narrows his eyes in the rearview mirror to look at Dean.

“Nope,” Dean says.

Mary looks uncertain. It’s quite clear that the officer has more than a few qualms about giving a lift to a couple of nameless wanderers, even if they’re not the first, but he doesn’t voice any of these concerns. He just lets them sit visibly in his expression.

He presses down a little harder on the gas, taps the steering wheel with his thumbs. Drives on to Albuquerque.

.

.

Castiel is not a stranger to grief.

He has observed its effect on humanity, has felt the power of its sudden blow and has been broken by the relentlessness with which it wields its weapons.

He felt it before he understood what it was.

He thinks perhaps that Balthazar is feeling it now.

They stand in the dismal rain of suffering London, whose stones reflect the bitter weather lashing her streets.

St Paul’s Churchyard is swarming with people, all standing vigil, holding candles that won’t stay alight.

But the people of London don’t seem to care. Bearing cigarette lighters and matchboxes they light and relight their candles, sniffling in the storm.

Some are singing, others crying.

And in their midst, two angels stand.

Balthazar sighs loudly. His hair is plastered to his forehead.

“Two bloody world wars I kept it safe,” he says.

The anger is somewhat undercut by the choked hurt it so badly conceals.

Before them, the cloven dome of St Paul’s Cathedral smokes grey against the swollen, weeping sky.

The point where the lightning struck has left charred scars of electricity along the veins of the Cathedral.

The singing rises through the din of the rain. Castiel cannot think of a single place that he cares for as it seems Balthazar cares for this building, but he cannot pretend he doesn’t he doesn’t understand his fellow angel’s pain. Not when his own loss is still stinging through his Grace like an infection.

“We can help them rebuild it,” Castiel suggests.

Balthazar laughs, like a thief on a hill. Pained and ferocious.

“We should go.”

“Go where?” Castiel asks.

“ _Heaven_ knows,” Balthazar sneers. “Back to your last man standing, I suppose. We should probably be grateful we’ve still got the reasonably more level-headed of the two left.”

Castiel’s hand is on Balthazar’s throat before he can think not to.

“You should know better,” he growls.

Balthazar looks unmoved by Castiel’s thumb digging a valley into his oesophagus. He stares at Castiel with tired eyes half covered by his soaked, tawny hair.

Rain has swallowed them both just as thoroughly as it has the rest of the crowd. Castiel can feel it trickling beneath his clothes, collecting in puddles at his hairline and in his shoes.

The muscle memory of Jimmy Novak’s body is temporarily gripped in a shiver.

Balthazar feels it through the palm pushed against his Adam’s apple and laughs quietly, a sombre, knowing threat.

“You are so far from what you once were,” he says, sounding neither pleased nor regretful.

Castiel lets go of Balthazar’s throat.

He feels a deep, impending love well up inside him, so abrupt and overwhelming and unwanted that he takes a step back from his fellow angel, as if the silk silver bristling of their wings brushing against each other burns him.

(Burns him as badly as this unasked for adoration.)

For the first time in a long while, Castiel wonders what he would be, were he born human from the start.

(Wonders _who_ he would be.)

He thinks he’d have loved Balthazar. He thinks he’d have wasted many years loving him.

A thorny, ugly part of Castiel reminds himself that wasted decades count up the time he has spent following Balthazar around, without the excuse of the petulant infatuation of being human. These confusions pass swiftly through Castiel with the fleeting winged thoughts of sparrows.

He is intensely aware of the rain on his head, of his sodden trench coat and the smell of burning and the singing of broken-hearted London and Balthazar’s face, his wondrous expression.

Pitying.

Castiel is defenceless against pity. It scorches his core like the bright of stolen Grace; like the shouting that masks crying, or a pair of wet green eyes.

“Will you help?” he asks.

Balthazar looks mournfully up at St Paul’s Cathedral, at the chunks blasted away to reveal ash and splendour.

Then Balthazar nods. Grits his teeth and shakes the rain out of his eyes.

“I should know better,” he says with a wry smirk.

Then he grips Castiel’s arm and with a heavy pull, wrenches them into the sky.

.

.

Trust is not a natural gift of Benny Lafitte’s.

He had been a suspicious man in life and a resentful vampire in death.

He had never acquired a taste for the company of men like Sam Winchester. He is unsettled by clever men and, at the very least, Sam Winchester is nothing if not clever.

He moves with limping grace about the kitchen, unnervingly quiet for one so large.

Benny sits as commanded at the table, a stack of notes in front of him half-read and abandoned. The smell of cheesy eggs and burnt toast permeates the room.

Sam cooks with a stilted disinterest that doesn’t match the creased frown in his forehead.

Benny tilts his head, projects sadness onto the dispassionate display. He was never inclined to think nicely of the man.

(He had heard too much devotion in Dean’s voice to feel anything better than distrust.)

So instead Benny watches Sam cook eggs with the same curiosity he feels for swarms of starlings in a town square, fluttering and quivering.

Sam hasn’t spoken a word since refuting his services as a blood bank.

He cooks. Benny watches.

The absence of their missing link is a cold wall between them.

As Sam dishes the eggs, Benny pushes aside the papers and grimaces.

“Mighty kind,” he drawls, to which Sam makes an aborted attempt to look the vampire in the eye as he nods.

“Yeah,” he grunts, looking disbelieving. “Are you, um…” he mutters as Benny takes the offered cutlery and scoops some eggs onto his fork.

Wearing a glum smile of satisfaction, Benny takes his first bite.

It’s warm, peppered and salty and there’s too much cheese. It tastes rich and thick and so close to the heady spill of a jugular he has to look down at the plate again to be sure it isn’t oozing crimson.

“You weren’t kidding,” Sam splutters, as if he had been expecting it to be nothing more than an elaborate prank. Benny chuffs a sound that is decidedly not a laugh. “Jesus,” Sam sighs, collapsing into a chair of his own. “Have you - so you’re -”

“I’d appreciate not cutting me a head shorter just to find out, if it’s all the same to you.”

Benny gives him a slow smirk and eats more eggs, chewing slowly. When he’d been living bag by bag, sip to sip and phone call to phone call, he’d learned better than ever how to savour small pleasures.

But he’s ravenous, too, in a way that used to be dangerous but now, feels wonderfully less so.

“Sure,” Sam says, very faint dimples in his cheeks.

Benny wipes his lips with his finger, tries not to press the soft flesh into his teeth, waiting for them to sharpen to pins in his mouth.

“Woke up forty miles out,” he says after a few minutes of shovelling and munching. “Can’t tell you how I knew what way to go. Just knew I was god damn starving and I needed to come here.”

“Did you know we were here?” Sam asks, picking at his food limply.

Benny shakes his head slowly, licks his lips and drops the crust of his toast onto his otherwise empty plate.

“Saw you and the angel coming back,” he says. Blinks guilty thoughts away as Sam’s fist curls on the table. “Thought Dean might be following, or uh - already inside. Thought I should wait for him, only then you came out and uh, I guess. Well.”

He tails off, itching and restless as Sam drops his barely touched toast at the mention of his brother.

“Sam,” Benny says. “I know you’re -”

“You don’t,” Sam retorts quickly, gathers up the plates and starts clearing the kitchen with routine efficiency. “Dean isn’t dead, Benny,” he continues hotly, a red rash spreading across the bridge of his nose. “He’s _gone_ . Totally - just gone. We couldn’t _fix it_. Not this time.

“We didn’t have a way out. So a reaper, she gave us one. She helped us. For a price. And Dean. Well. You know Dean.”

It sounds bitter on Sam’s tongue, that final acknowledgement. Benny can hear the labour in his breath.

He can feel his own heart thrumming in his chest, too. It’s _exhilarating_ . The lively stuttering in his body, the _aliveness_ of him.

He’s suddenly very aware of a tight strain on his bladder and he laughs.

He laughs loudly, a surprised, dancing sound.

Sam looks affronted when he turns around.

Benny waves him down breathlessly. The prickle of relieved tears in his eyes is hot as he stands.

“I uh, need to use the facilities,” he says.

Even Sam softens at that, not quite a smile but a definite quirk of amusement.

“Left down the hall, first right,” he says, pointing.

Benny pauses briefly at the doorway.

He drums his fingers over the frame and looks Sam directly in the eye.

“I appreciate your help, Sam,” he says. “And I’ll do whatever I can to help you, too.”

Sam ducks his head awkwardly at that. He continues cleaning the pan in the sink, frowning softly.

It’s only because he stops just out of sight, gathering himself as he runs a hand over his face, that Benny hears Sam mutter quietly to the empty kitchen,

“You picked a real bad time to go, Dean.”

.

.

( _Twilight, midnight then dawn; billion stars, then there was one._ )

.

.

Albuquerque is overflowing. The streets are swarming as the police vehicle maneouvres through the crowds, who are huddled together in twos and threes, spilling out from hotels and diners onto the sidewalks.

The driving officer, whose name they have learned is Gillespie, hisses under his breath as four young teens dash across the road up ahead, shrieking as they carry huge bags and boxes in their arms.

“Clinic’s just here,” Officer Balton says as Gillespie pulls up outside a large brick building, doors flung wide and a concentrated gathering of loudness milling outside it.

“Thank you,” Mary says hoarsely and even Dean manages a weak smile of gratitude.

He clambers out, leaning over to help Mary, who grumbles her independence even as she leans into her son’s chest for support.

Dean smiles painfully at a sudden and vivid memory that briefly overwhelms him. John Winchester, a bloodied knee and a mild concussion, grumbling as he waves away his son, only to grab his shoulders with whisky sharpened hands when he stumbles.

He chuckles dryly as pulls his mom a little closer, waving off the officers with a cracked smile as they nod them towards the clinic.

The street is crowded and there’s no room for extra bodies. Officer Balton’s lingering stare is discomfiting and tender. He turns away reluctantly with nothing more than handing Dean a business card for the motel offering free rooms for the night.

“We need a phone,” Dean says as soon as the cop car is halfway down the street.

He pauses, frowning at the way Mary has frozen, staring about her at the crowds of people.

“And shoes,” he adds. “Shoes first. There’s got to be a shelter somewhere -”

It might have been more than twenty years since he’s needed one, but it turns out his Homeless Shelter Radar doesn’t have an expiration date.

Following a thin line of stragglers moving away from the crowded clinic, Dean takes his Mom’s hand and leads her towards a building that looks like every other Salvation Army base he’s ever seen.

“Want me to carry you?” he asks, but Mary shakes her head, mouth closed and downturned.

She squeezes his hand harder, urging him on.

Inside the foyer is much cooler, but he is quickly greeted by a harassed looking girl not much older than twenty. Her awkward smile and shock of red hair sends an uncomfortable pang shooting through his stomach.

“More wanderers?”she asks, taking in their dishevelled, burnt appearances. “This way.”

She immediately leads them towards a side room, chirping enthusiastically about the upsurge in donations, bouncing with every step as she points out where they can get a bite of food and to the admittedly large piles of blankets and clothes spread across several tables.

“We’ve got a couple of cell phones on charge. There might be a wait, though, if you need to make a call. Not sure what clothes you need, but I should be able to scrounge some socks at least. Here,” she abruptly snatches up a bottle from a table and hands it to Dean. “We don’t have much in the way of medical supplies, but at least you can lather up.”

Looking down, Dean realises she’s handed him cheap, store brand moisturiser.

“All you folks out in the desert,” the girl says with an understanding grin. “Not one person’s walked in here without sunburn since the day before yesterday.”

Dean tries to thank her but the words catch in his throat like thorns. Exhaustion is finally catching up with him. All he can think about is the smaller, frightened hand clamped tight around his own.

It reminds him painfully of being ten years old, Sammy in tow, standing in a soup kitchen with his battered pride surrounding him like a barbed fence.

The girl in front of him is short, with a plain smile and bright eyes. She has a kind face, though he reckons maybe even Abaddon would have a kind looking face if he saw it right now.

He wants nothing more than to be in the Bunker, to be with Sam and Cas, to be done with this shit, whatever the hell _this shit_ turns out to be.

“Rest here,” the girl says. “I’ll be back soon.”

And with a flick of her red ponytail, she disappears into the crowded hall.

“Dean,” Mary says quietly, tearing Dean back to the situation at hand.

He looks at his mother, at the red skin already peeling on her nose and the dirt in her blonde hair. She looks tired and afraid.

She looks awfully young.

“Come on.” He gestures to a space at a wall, between an old man sleeping where he sits and two teenagers crying into each other’s shoulders.

Gently he pours some cream onto his hands and starts to dab it onto his mother’s forehead.

Her green eyes are sharp as they rake over his face, knowing and curious and too heavy for him to bear.

“Sam,” she says, a burst of sound like a firework, the most important word in Dean’s vocabulary.

Dean pauses in his cautious ministrations, leans back to look into his mother’s eyes so she can see his smile.

“Best man I know,” he says, sincere and reverent.

Something unspoken and terrible seems to dissipate between them.

Mary smiles a brilliant smile, a wet and radiant smile.

“I’ve missed so much,” she says.

She’s not wrong, of course, but he’s already said as much. Doesn’t want to say it again, not yet.

So he laughs, instead.

“Tell me about it,” he chuckles. “You won’t even know what Game of Thrones is.”

Mary’s baffled frown tugs another laugh from his throat. In retaliation, she snatches the bottle from his hand and starts lathering Dean’s burnt face in cold cream.

He accepts the attention without complaint, can’t deny the warmth spreading through him, so different from the punishing heat of the sun outside.

“Ok, I’ve got sandals, a few anti-bacteria wipes, water and a couple minutes on an iphone,” a voice says above them.

The girl is back, looking a little less stressed as she passes Mary a handful of wipes and a tattered pair of sandals, leaves a bottle of water between them and gestures Dean towards a corner where a man is ending a call on a cell phone plugged into the wall.

Mary is staring at the man suspiciously as she takes a wipe and starts cleaning out one of the uglier cuts on her feet. Deciding now isn’t the time to start explaining 21st Century technology to his mother, Dean makes his way to the phone with a quick press of his hand on her shoulder.

All around people are chattering and comforting.

Knowing he only has limited time, he types Sam’s cell number.

As it rings, a sudden flash of fear grips him tightly, like a fist around his intestines.

He recalls, years ago, in the well of grief for his father, answering a phone call from John Winchester, his elation and need, Sam’s distrust; the damning reality of the call. He realises how badly this could go, how much it might hurt Sam when the voice of his dead brother starts jabbering nonsense down the phone.

Sam, whose heart and faith have been so thoroughly battered into defeated submission by years of grief and torment.

The phone rings and anticipation eats up Dean’s nerve endings. What will he say? Should he apologise? Should he start with proof straight away or wait for Sam to ask for it?

“ _This is Sam’s phone, leave a mess-_ ”

Dean ends the call, almost drops the phone, so violent is his rejection of that expressionless command.

There’s no way he’s leaving a goddamn voicemail for the poor guy. He casts a guilty glance at the girl, who gives him a concerned, pitying look that makes him squirm.

He calls Cas next, but his phone doesn’t even ring.

Another, uglier fear starts leaking into the perimeter of Dean’s thoughts.

He looks at his Mom, at the miracle of her very aliveness. She’s got one sandal on as she starts on her other foot with a new wipe, brushing out the grit from the cuts, barely wincing in her determination.

Has something happened to Sam? To Cas?

Is this perhaps not his world after all, but rather some alternate universe, where the dead are in fact alive, and the alive are now dead?

Is John Winchester alive somewhere out there, too?

Dean doesn’t like the sickly fear that permeates his weak, flowering hope.

Even as he looks at his mother, as he imagines Mary and John Winchester restored to the lives they deserved to live together, he knows Sam is not a price he would be willing to pay for that to happen.

His hands shaking, his head pounding, Dean makes one more call.

The Bunker telephone rings. With every fibre of his being, Dean begs for someone to answer.

Hell, at this point he’d even take an answer from -

The answer doesn’t come, but in his desperation, Dean ends the call, his heart thumping quietly, rabbit rapid in his chest.

“Sorry,” he says to the girl.

“Go ahead,” she says, nodding her head, though her arms are crossed over her chest and she’s starting to look worried.

Typing one last number, Dean calls his final resort.

Someone picks up, but doesn’t say a word, evidently suspicious of the unknown number.

“Crowley, it’s Dean.”

Nothing but a small intake of breath.

Then,

“ _Who?_ ”

“Dean Winchester,” he grunts impatiently.

“ _No, it’s not_ ,” Crowley drawls in that anger-masking fear tone that Dean knows so well.

“Don’t make me sing Midnight Train to Georgia,” Dean replies shakily.

“ _Squirrel?_ ” Crowley scoffs.

He sounds, if Dean can believe it, almost emotional.

“One and only,” Dean laugh shakily. “Don’t suppose you know where Cas and my brother are?”

“ _Drowning their sorrows, I expect,_ ” Crowley suggests haughtily. “ _They took off pretty quick after you bit the dust. Or, well. Didn’t bite the dust._ ”

“Sorry,” Dean snorts at the King of the Hell’s tone. “I’ll try harder next time.”

“ _Where are you?_ ” Crowley asks. " _There’s been nothing but trouble since you left._ ”

Dean isn’t particularly thrilled how Crowley makes it sound like he decided to go on vacation.

Still, it isn’t like Dean doesn’t know what the demon’s talking about.

“Albuquerque,” Dean supplies automatically, tries not to berate himself for readily revealing his location to the demon he’s expended so much energy trying to evade, one-up or kill for the past _too many_ years.

“ _And Moose and your feathered friend have no idea you’re alive?_ ” Crowley says with an audible grin. He sounds like he’s preening, as if he actually thinks he’s Dean first call.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the redheaded girl restlessly shifting her weight.

“I can’t get hold of them,” Dean says. “Look, Crowley. I need to get back to the Bunker. Either help me or call Sam and Cas, ok?”

The impatience was too much.

The call ends before Dean can get his last word out and he lets out half a curse that he turns into a vague noise of frustration.

“Sorry,” he mutters to the girl. “Thank you.”

He hands her the iphone and retreats to where his mother is freshly sandalled and holding the bottle of moisturiser.

Mary scowls, motherly and stern.

“Your arms are a state,” she says.

Dean looks down at himself. His skin is tight and shiny.

He accepts the bottle reluctantly and starts rubbing cream into his stinging arms.

Mary seems to have regained some of her composure. Her eyes are still full of questions but she looks calmer all the same, her hair pulled up into a scrunchie and Dean’s shirt replaced over her nightgown with a pale yellow cardigan.

Dean takes the plaid back, pulls it on reluctantly once his arms are soaked in cheap moisturiser and accepts the half empty water bottle she offers him, too.

“So, what’s the plan?” she asks as he sips the water.

“We need to get to Kansas,” he says, smiling tiredly at her bemused look. “Sam will be there. I can’t get hold of him.”

“Then who were you talking to?” she asks.

“The King of Hell,” he mutters with dark humour

At Mary’s blank look, Dean sighs deeply.

“I say we take up Officer Balton’s motel offer, get some sleep. Tomorrow, we leave for Kansas.”

This plan seems to sit well with Mary. She nods confidently, getting to her feet slowly and pulling her son up with her.

“You can tell me about _iphones_ on the way,” she grumbles under her breath. “ _King of Hell_ my ass.”

Dean snickers and she flashes him a grin so familiar, he feels some of his anxiety loosen in his chest.

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” he says.

For the first time in his life, Dean thinks, he actually means that.

.

.

( _Listen to the good word as I’m telling it, the Elephant King is the King of the Elephants_.)

.

.

Contrary to a nasty little rumour that’s been going around lately, the King of Hell does not like the Winchesters.

The infinitesimal twinge of mild distaste he had felt at the apparent demise of the eldest Hardy Boy had been, in the grand scheme of three hundred human years of evil, barely a blip on his vast and terrible radar.

Sitting disgruntled on his throne, his silent phone clutched in a vice grip of one hand, Crowley wonders how desperate for friends Squirrel must think he is. He grimaces to himself and the empty room before him, recalling the conversation.

The liberty of it!

“Your Majesty,” a cool voice drawls, suddenly, as a figure materialises before him.

It’s not quite sarcastic enough to earn punishment, not quite sincere enough to prevent Crowley from curling his lips back over his teeth.

The figure stands in the centre of the room, a slight and tattered being with bloody gums and angry eyes.

“Yes, sweetheart?” he replies slyly. “You’re not due for a few more decades,” he reminds her.

The newly born demon ripples at her frayed edges.

She’s dressed in the meatsuit she’d lived in, though it will do her no good topside.

“I’m ready,” she says.

“I can see that.”

He regards her bruises, her suitably Frankenstein scars. She blends into the pit chaos, now. Far better than she did when she first arrived, whimpering and mewling.

“Well?” she spits, impatient and possibly embarrassed by his blatant leering.

“I have a job for you.”

The demon shivers with excitement and Crowley laughs to see her dead eyes swallowed up with ink.

“I want you to go to Albuquerque,” he says. “I want you to find out why Dean Winchester isn’t dead.”

The demon’s filthy red grin is a snarl in her bony face.

“Then,” he continues calmly. “I want you to bring him here. To me.”

With a sarcastically sincere curtsy to match her tone, the demon bows herself out the throne room.

A thought occurs to Crowley before she disappears out of sight. He calls out to her with relish hot as Hellfire in his veins.

“Oh, and Bela?”

The demon glances up, her every atom gleaming.

“Take Juliet with you,” he says. “She’s grown quite fond of you.”

The demon that once was Bela Talbot nods, this time looking grateful.

“Do you have a preferred state you’d like him in?” she asks.

Crowley considers his myriad of options.

“Not dead,” he decides, much to Bela’s dismay. “Suitably ruffled, though.”

With a final curtsy so low it almost takes her to her knees, Bela leaves.

Crowley eyes his phone with dubious fury.

It doesn’t ring again.

.

.


End file.
